Orson Welles: Hello Americans (66 page)

The Whorehouse piano plays through until Mike has punched Broome in the nose and Rita starts to run away. On the first cut of her crossing the street, there is a strong backlight on this. There is a cross-fade on this in which we hear Fading
OUT
the sound of the Whorehouse piano and Fading in over this Shot a very fast rumba which is probably going to be the one from the Astaire
picture. It isn’t important – a lot of drums and action … this goes through from the Quick travelling shot of Rita running and just as we come to the shot of the band as she runs: a quick
QUICK
cross-fade which takes us into ‘Palabras du Mohair’ which plays through until we cut outside and the line ‘What’s the name for a drunken bum’ is repeated.

(It is striking that in this version of the screenplay,
Welles refers to all the other characters by their story names, but Elsa is only ever ‘Rita’.)

At the end of the chase, Michael and Rita find themselves in a secluded room. He asks her to dance, and immediately the music police (having let Welles get away with a whole sequence as he wanted it to be) assert themselves by imposing a backing that is both rhythmically and atmospherically meaningless.
It is in this scene – all shadows and shafts of illumination – that Elsa scoffs at Michael’s dreams for their life together, telling him that he must come to terms with all-pervading badness. ‘You don’t know how to take care of yourself,’ she tells him, ‘so how could you take care of me?’ Here it is distinctly moot as to whether it is ‘Elsa’ or Rita talking. The next scene at the jetty brings
more doubts on Elsa’s part: how will they live? Will she take in washing? As she parts from him, that wretched pop song, which has wound its way into every scene like ivy, wells up into a ghastly mutated Irish rhapsody for viola and strings; in his memo to Cohn, Welles says, ‘
I think that damn tune is in every scene!
’ It very early is.

Now it is imperative for Mike to earn the $5,000 for appearing
to murder Grisby, and he agrees to Grisby’s plan. Through the window of the bar in which they’re drinking, they see Bannister and converse with him; again and again in
The Lady from Shanghai
people are glimpsed through glass, sometimes shattered, often at an odd angle. The intention is, naturally, to create visual variety (to take the curse off the cliché, in Welles’s own words), but it also seems
increasingly to predict the film’s penultimate sequence in the Hall of Mirrors, where it is impossible to tell what is real, what merely reflected. O’Hara, though apparently living in the real world, is already being swept along by events and people that seem to change every minute. After being given secret instructions by the Chinese chauffeur to meet Elsa at the aquarium, Mike goes to meet
Grisby, who gives him the money and dictates a statement for him, confessing to the murder. This section of the plot is not, it must be said, an improvement on the relative simplicity of Sherwood King’s narrative, but it is a scene superbly played by Anders and Welles; the latter is seated throughout, as Anders (shot from below) circles him, prattling about his new life in the South Seas. None of
it makes sense to O’Hara, who is starkly lit to emphasise his panic and confusion, as if caught in headlights; he becomes curiously boyish, staring up at Grisby in terror.

Welles had asked for the corniest Hawaiian music imaginable in
this
sequénce, to be played at a high level; as it is, it is a vaguely Polynesian, virtually inaudible murmur behind the scene, thus depriving it of a level of
edginess that is central to Welles’s technique, both in the theatre and on radio.
Citizen Kane
is inconceivable without those heightened moments, in which sound – including, of course, dialogue – creates a hectic intensity, ratcheting up the nervous tension, inducing instability and thus unpredictability. Where another director creates energy by the linear pursuit of action, or by focusing on
the psychology of the characters, Welles seeks to shock, alarm, almost to ambush the audience with dynamic contrasts and skewed perspectives. The desired effect is, so to speak, in-your-face, a super-realism in acting, in image and above all in sound. Remove any of these elements and the result is less impressive. Harry Cohn and his team worked hard and long to eliminate as many of them as they could,
especially visually and sonically. The fact that a scene like the one between Grisby and O’Hara succeeds as well as it does, deprived of a critical factor in the scene – the intensified sound score – is a tribute to the force of Welles’s imagination and the actors’ flair, but is not quite what he intended.

Michael is next seen in the aquarium, where Elsa comes to him, dressed in black. Against
a background of monstrously magnified fish, he tells her what he’s agreed to; reading the statement he’s signed, she is troubled. They kiss; some schoolchildren (a slightly clumsy touch) giggle at them; she tells him he must be careful. As the scene progresses, the lighting on their two figures becomes more and more stylised: it picks out her perfect profile as he speaks of his passion; then they
become pure silhouettes, with the shadowy, watery shapes pulsing gently behind them.

The reality of what he has agreed to hits Michael in the next scene. He drives Grisby back to the Bannisters’ house; Grisby goes through the garden but is intercepted by Broome, who lewdly suggests that he knows about Grisby and Elsa. The scene is shot in a heightened way to show the battle for domination between
the two men. Crossed, Grisby shoots the insolent butler and returns to the car. When questioned by Michael as to the gunshot he replies, his leering sweaty face filling the frame, ‘It was
taarget
practice, just as you were
suppoosed
to have been doing when you threw my
coorpse
into the bay!’ These extreme exaggerations are brilliantly handled by Anders, the perfect Wellesian actor, making huge
shapes and filling them with wit and danger. Grisby can barely suppress snickering as he contemplates his own feigned demise, almost whimpering with suppressed delight and anticipation. The effect is not
melodramatic
or hammy, because it is so precise and so convincing. In a nutshell, it is brilliant acting. Grisby’s bubbling excitement continues through the subsequent car ride to the beach; suddenly
another vehicle looms up and they smash into the back of it – Michael confused and worried; Grisby blithely accepting the card of the other man, hardly waiting till he has gone to tell O’Hara that this will confirm their story; both of them are bleeding. This whole plot mechanism is derived more or less without alteration from
If I Die Before I Wake
; and Welles’s O’Hara, like King’s Larry Planter,
is by now in a positively trance-like state. The heavy shadows from the smashed windscreen – which Welles shoots head-on at the time of the crash, giving us the passengers’ point of view – sit across their faces in parallel bars, a strange and dream-like vision.

Back at the Bannisters’, we see the dying Broome telling Elsa that Bannister is to be shot. O’Hara and Grisby arrive at the jetty; after
snatching Michael’s cap, Grisby makes off in the speedboat and O’Hara nervously lets off his three shots. Immediately people throng out to see what’s happened; in a brilliantly organised sequence, he stumbles off, waving his gun, saying that he’s been doing ‘
taarget
practice’ as the crowd pushes around him. We cut to shadowy shot of Grisby at the San Francisco landing jetty, cocking his gun. O’Hara
gets away from the crowd and makes a phone call to the Bannisters’ house: Broome answers, telling him that he’s been framed and that he must get to the office in Montgomery Street, which he does, arriving to find a throng of policemen, into whose arms Michael runs just as Bannister sways into view, shortly followed by Grisby’s corpse and then Elsa. Bret Wood reports a cut scene (whether actually
filmed or deleted from the script is unclear) in which Grisby is seen from the partners’ office, high above the street; a bullet rings out and he is dead. Whether this would have added a great deal is also unclear.

Elsa has promised Mike that Bannister will defend him, and she and Bannister are, sitting on a bench in the judge’s chambers discussing how they will proceed; Elsa lights up under
a very prominent ‘No Smoking’ sign. They are in shadow, and now the shadow of the judge looms over them; Bannister exchanges knowing banter with him: we only ever see the judge’s shadow. Bannister tensely conveys to Elsa how hopeless Michael’s case is: his story about Grisby makes no sense, and he has been found with $5,000 on him. He tries to touch her; she recoils. Later, she visits Michael in jail:
he is behind a metal mesh. He knows how bad his case is.
The
scene is highly striking visually: the narrowness of the room Elsa is in is underlined; Michael’s face is only ever seen with the metal mesh in front of it, at the end squaring him up like graph paper. She tells him she loves him, but can offer little hope. Welles had intended them to be barely audible; here they boom away with, needless
to say, ‘Please Don’t Kiss Me’ chundering mournfully away on solo cello.

The following trial scene is presented as circus or something out of
Alice in Wonderland
– or perhaps Kafka – with red-faced Erskine Sandford battily presiding over the strutting attorneys while the public chatters, eats, sneezes, snoozes, ‘oohs’, ‘aahs’ and gasps on cue; two young women discuss the case in Chinese; ‘You’re
not kidding,’ the first says at the end of the conversation. At one point the prosecution suddenly calls defence counsel – Bannister – as a witness; Bannister gets into the box, but harangues the judge from it, then insists on his right to cross-examine himself (both of these developments, surprisingly, suggested by the novel, which conveys an equally farcical aspect to the proceedings). The camera
keeps changing its position restlessly, now at the back of the courtroom, now at the side, now above, now in the judge’s lap. Welles’s own cutaways, shot much later than the main scene, belong to a wholly different world visually, and indeed seem – in technical jargon – to cross the line: that is, he appears to be looking in the opposite direction from the one he should be. Elsa Bannister is
suddenly called to the witness box; she cannot deny that she kissed him. The judge adjourns the case while the jury deliberates; we cut to a Chinese family, high up, looking over San Francisco and listening to reports of it; we see the judge, reflected in the window, looking over another part of San Francisco, playing chess with himself; we see Bannister, Elsa and O’Hara in the empty courtroom, waiting.
Bannister tells O’Hara with vicious relish that he’ll go to the electric chair. Outside, the judge, summoned to return to court, sprays his throat and starts to make his entrance; as the court files back, O’Hara eyes the tablets that Bannister is taking and suddenly swallows a few. There are screams; he must be kept moving, someone shouts, or he’s done for, and so he is escorted upright out
of the courtroom into an adjacent room, where he suddenly slugs the young policeman who has been helping him on the jaw, knocks over furniture and book-cases, empties cabinets and hurls a statuette at the camera, narrowly missing it and smashing a sheet of glass, just where you would expect the camera’s lens to have been. He then makes a run for
it,
using as decoy a jury deliberating another case,
and slips away into Chinatown.

The courtroom scene is a classic piece of Wellesian staging and – apart from the strangely disorientating dropped-in single shots of Welles and Hayworth – works brilliantly. Here again, Welles complained bitterly about the elimination during editing of the raucousness of the public, the nearly permanent sense of hubbub present on the original soundtrack, and it
is clear that the more grotesque the scene could have been, the better. The three scenes while the court is in recess are effective contrasts in stillness; but the plot device of swallowing the tablets – obviously not drawn from the novel, where Larry is found guilty and spends the rest of the book in jail – is a little desperate, and the subsequent getaway straight out of a Boy’s Own adventure book.
Welles is not at his most convincing as a dashing escapee, and the undoubted virtuosity of the staging, with police and judiciary rushing about left and right, seems to belong to another film: it ceases to be a nightmare and briefly (and unconvincingly) becomes a caper movie. Once Michael hits Chinatown – we see him scurrying down the streets, through a series of shop windows painted with Chinese
characters – the film regains its stylistic coherence; plunging into a performance of the Chinese Opera, O’Hara takes us with him into a deeply exotic world, wonderfully and evocatively filmed in wide-shot and close-up, from on stage and backstage and from the auditorium. For Michael, it is a sort of beautiful nightmare, at once incomprehensible and compelling. This sequence, like the scenes at
Acapulco, transcends mere background. Welles had been in Shanghai with his father as a boy and had written a vivid account of Chinese theatre in his local newspaper; he had followed it knowledgeably ever since. His sense of its integrity gives the scene a depth and power it would lack in the hands of someone else: paradoxically, however theatrical, it is a wholly real world into which he has stumbled,
not something devised for passing effect.

Michael slips into a seat at the theatre, where Elsa soon joins him. We have seen her running down the same streets of Chinatown, asking passers-by – in Chinese – whether they’ve seen him, finding the theatre, going to the dressing room and finally (eyed by an actor about to put his wig on) making a phone call to Lee, an elderly Chinese man whom we saw
earlier listening to reports of the trial on the radio. Infuriatingly, Viola Lawrence cut an exchange between Elsa and O’Hara, in which she recounts to him what she pretends is the story of the play: ‘I’ll tell you the
plot.
The lady loves a man … a poor sailor … the poor sailor’s accused of murder, but the lady’s jealous …’ O’Hara takes the story over, ending with the words: ‘With the partner
dead, who is it gets the benefit of the insurance? Who stands to gain by killing him?’ To which Elsa replies: ‘One person – only one.’ In the film as released, she simply sits beside Mike as the police enter the auditorium; she whispers to him to sit still, and suddenly kisses him to make sure of it. The shot of the two of them is wittily fringed by an ancient Chinaman in the row in front, a half-smoked
cigarette jutting out of his mouth, three inches of ash threatening to fall at any moment, which produces its own comic tension. The police prowl around the auditorium, the camera picking up eyes everywhere: Mike’s, Elsa’s, those of the police, above all the actors’, their huge and stylised orbs swivelling from side to side in terrified curiosity. Mike starts to free himself from Elsa, telling
her that he knows who the murderer is: ‘You’re the killer.’ He finds her gun – the gun with which she must have killed Grisby – in her handbag, but even as he threatens her with it, the tablets take effect and he slumps to the floor. Elsa’s friend Lee has been standing by the light switch and now abruptly plunges the theatre into darkness. Out in the street, we see Lee and his friends taking
O’Hara to a nearby out-of-season Crazy House, where he wakes up.